Chapter 2

Take, for example, the case of Ranger Edward C. Pulaski, of the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, stationed at Wallace, Idaho. Pulaski had charge of forty Italians and Poles. He had been at work with them for many hours, when the flames grew to be so threatening that it became a question of whether he could save his men. The fire was travelling faster than the men could make their way through the dense forest, and the only hope was to find some place into which the fire could not come. Accordingly Pulaski guided his party at a run through the blinding smoke to an abandoned mine he knew of in the neighborhood. When they reached it, he sent the men into the workings ahead of him, hung a wet blanket across the mouth of the tunnel, and himself stood there on guard. The fierce heat, the stifling air, and their deadly fear drove some of the foreigners temporarily insane, and a number of them tried to break out. With drawn revolver Pulaski held them back. One man did get by him and was burned to death. Many fainted in the tunnel. The Ranger himself, more exposed than any of his men, was terribly burned. He stood at his post, however, for five hours, until the fire had passed, and brought his party through without losing a single man except that one who got out of the tunnel, although his own injuries were so severe that he was in the hospital for two months as a result of them. The record of the Forest Service in these terrible fires is one of which every Forester may well be proud.

The Ranger must protect his District, not only against fire but against the theft of timber and the incessant efforts of land grabbers to steal Government lands. To prevent the theft of timber is usually not difficult, but it is far harder to prevent fake homesteaders, fraudulent mining men, and other dishonest claimants from seizing upon land to which they have no right, and so preventing honest men from using these claims to make a living.

In the past, this problem has presented the most serious difficulties, and still occasionally does so. There is no louder shouter for "justice" than a balked habitual land thief with political influence behind him. To illustrate the kind of attack upon the Forest Service to which fraudulent land claims have constantly given rise, I may cite the statements made during one of the annual attempts in the Senate to break down the Service. One of the Senators asserted that in his State the Forest Service was overbearing and tyrannical, and that in a particular case it had driven out of his home a citizen known to the Senator, and had left him and his family to wander houseless upon the hillside, and that for no good reason whatsoever.

This statement, if it had been true, would at once have destroyed the standing of the Service in the minds of many of its friends, and would have led to immediate defeat in the fight then going on. Fortunately, the records of the Service were so complete, and the knowledge of field conditions on the part of the men in Washington was so thorough, that the mere mention of the general locality of the supposed outrage by the Senator made it easy to identify the individual case. The man in question, instead of being an honest settler with a wife and family, was the keeper of a disreputable saloon and dance hall, a well-known law-breaker whom the local authorities had tried time and again to dispossess and drive away. But by means of his fraudulent claim the man had always defeated the local officers. When, however, the officers of the Forest Service took the case in hand, the situation changed and things moved quickly. The disreputable saloon was promptly removed from the fraudulent land claim by means of which the keeper of it had held on, and this thoroughly undesirable citizen either went out of business or removed his abominable trade to some locality outside the National Forest.

The actual facts were fully brought out in the debate next day, remained uncontradicted, and saved the fight for the Forest Service. The whole incident may be found at length in the Congressional Record.

The Forest Ranger is charged with overseeing and regulating the free use of timber by settlers and others who live in or near the National Forests. Last year (1912) the Forest Service gave away without charge more than $196,000 worth of saw timber, house logs, fencing, fuel, and other material to men and women who needed it for their own use. Usually it is the Ranger's work to issue the permits for this free use, and to designate the timber that may be cut. For this purpose, he must be well acquainted with the kinds and the uses of the trees in his District, and it is most important that he should know something of how their reproduction can best be secured, in order that the free use may be permitted without injury to the future welfare of the forest.

A Ranger oversees the use of his District for the grazing of cattle, sheep, and other domestic animals. He must acquaint himself with the brands and marks of the various owners, and should be well posted in the essentials of the business of raising cattle, sheep, and horses. The allotment of grazing areas is one of the most difficult problems to adjust, because the demand is almost always for much more range than is available and the division of what range there is among the local owners of stock often presents serious difficulties, in which the Ranger's local knowledge and advice is constantly sought by his superior officer.

There is a wise law, passed at the request of the Forest Service, under which land in the National Forests which is shown to be agricultural may be entered under the homestead law, and used for the making of homes. This law is peculiarly hard to carry out because the ceaseless efforts of land grabbers to misuse it demand great vigilance on the part of the Forest Officers. In many cases it is the Ranger who makes the report upon which the decision as to the agricultural or non-agricultural character of the land is based, although in other cases the examinations to determine whether the land is really agricultural in character are made by Examiners especially trained for this duty. Serious controversies into which politics enter are often caused by the efforts of speculators and others, under pretext of this law, to get possession of lands chiefly valuable for their timber.

The building and maintenance of trails, telephone lines, roads, bridges, and fences in his District is under the charge of the Ranger, and in many cases Rangers and Forest Guards are appointed by the State as Wardens to see to it that the game and fish laws are properly enforced.

Next to the protection of his District from fire, the most important duty of the Ranger has to do with the sale of timber and the marking of the individual trees which are to be cut. The reproduction of the forest depends directly on what trees are kept for seed, or on how the existing young growth is protected and preserved in felling and swamping the trees which have been marked for cutting, and in skidding the logs. The disposal of the slash must be looked after, for it has much to do with forest reproduction, and with promoting safety from fire. Then, the scaling of the logs determines the amount of the payment the Government receives for its timber, and there are often regulations governing the transportation of the scaled logs whose enforcement is of great consequence to the future forest.

Nearly all of these duties the Ranger may perform in certain cases without supervision, if his judgment and training are sufficient, but the marking especially is often done under the eye or in accordance with the directions of the technical Forester, whose duty it is to see that the future of the forest is protected by enforcing the conditions of sale.

These are but a part of the duties of the Ranger, for he is concerned with all the uses which his District may serve. The streams, for example, may be important for city water supply, irrigation, or for waterpower, and their use for these purposes must be under his eye. Hotels and saw-mills on sites leased from the Government may dot his District here and there. The land within National Forests may be put to a thousand other uses, from a bee ranch on the Cleveland Forest in southern California to a whaling station on the Tongass Forest in Alaska, all of which means work for him.

The result of all this is that the Ranger comes in contact with city dwellers, irrigators, cattlemen, sheepmen, and horsemen, ranchers, storekeepers, hotel men, hunters, miners, and lumbermen, and above all with the settlers who live in or near his District. With all these it is his duty to keep on good terms, for well he knows that one man at certain times can set more fires than a regiment can extinguish, and that the best protection for his District comes from the friendly interest of the men who live in it or near it.

A Forest Guard is in effect an assistant to the Ranger, and may be called upon to carry out most of the duties which fall upon a Ranger.

The foregoing short statement will make it clear that preliminary experience as a Ranger may be of the utmost value to the man who proposes later on to perform in the Government Service the duties of a trained Forester. It is becoming more and more common, and fortunately so, for graduates of forest schools to begin their work in the United States Forest Service as Rangers or Forest Guards. The man who has done well a Ranger's work, like the graduate of an engineering school who, after graduation, has entered a machine shop as a hand, has acquired a body of practical information and experience which will be invaluable to him in the later practice of his profession, and which is far beyond the reach of any man who has not been trained in the actual execution of this work on the ground and in actual daily contact with the multifarious uses and users of the forest.

THE FOREST SUPERVISOR

The Supervisor is the general manager of a National Forest. The responsibility for the protection, care, and use of it falls upon him, under the direction of the District Forester. The Supervisor is responsible for making the use of his forest as valuable and as convenient as possible for the people in and around the area of which he has charge. He deals with the organizations of forest users, such as local stock associations, and issues permits for grazing live stock in the forest. Permits for cutting small amounts of timber are granted by him, and he advertises in the papers the sale of larger amounts and receives bids from prospective purchasers; keeps the accounts of his forest; and makes regular reports on a variety of important subjects, such as the personnel of his forest force, the permanent improvements made or to be made, the permits issued for regular and special uses of the forest and for free use of timber and forage, the number and kinds of predatory animals killed, the amount of forest planting accomplished, and the expense and losses from forest fires. He has general oversight of the roads, trails, and other improvements on his forest; and prepares plans for the extension of them. In particular, he directs, controls, and inspects the work of the Ranger and Guards, and in general, he attends to the thousand and one matters which go to adjusting the use of the forest to the needs of the men who use it, and on which depends whether the forest is well or badly thought of among the people whose cooperation or opposition have so much to do with making its management successful or otherwise.

The Supervisor spends about half his time in the office and half in the field, inspecting the work of his men and consulting with them, meeting local residents or associations of local residents who have propositions to submit for improving the service of the forest to them, or for correcting mistakes, or who wish to lay before the Supervisor some one of the numberless matters in which the forest affects their welfare. The usefulness of the Supervisor depends as much upon his good judgment, his ability to meet men and do business with them, and his knowledge of local needs and local affairs, as it does upon his knowledge of the forest itself. As in the case of every superior officer, his attitude toward his work, his energy, his good sense, and his good will are or should be reflected in the men under him, so that his position is one of the greatest importance in determining the success or failure of each National Forest, and hence of the Forest Service as a whole. More and more of the trained Foresters in the Service are seeking and securing appointments as Forest Supervisors because of the interest and satisfaction they find in the work. Such men handle both the professional and business sides of forest management. Many of their duties, therefore, are described in the succeeding chapter.

The position of Supervisor is in many respects the most desirable a trained Forester can occupy in the Forest Service, and the most responsible of the field positions.

THE TRAINED FORESTER

To each forest where timber cutting has become important there are assigned one or more Forest Assistants or Forest Examiners. These are professionally trained Foresters. They are subordinate upon each forest to the Supervisor as manager, but it is their work which has most to do with deciding whether the Forest Service in general is to be successful or is to fail in the great task of preserving the forest by wise use.

The Forest Assistant secures his position with the Service by passing an examination devised to test his technical knowledge and his ability. After he has served two years as Forest Assistant the quality and quantity of his work will have determined his fitness to continue in the employ of the Government. If he is unfit he may be dropped, for there are many young and ambitious men ready to step into his place. If he makes good he is promoted to the grade of Forest Examiner and is put definitely in charge of certain lines of professional work; always, of course, under the direction of the Supervisor, of whom he becomes the adviser on all problems involving technical forestry.

The most important tasks of the trained Forester on a National Forest are the preparation of working plans for the use of the forest by methods which will protect and perpetuate it as well, and the carrying out of the plans when made. This is forestry in the technical sense of the word. It involves a thorough study of the kinds of timber, their amount and location, their rate of growth, their value, the ease or difficulty of their reproduction, and the methods by which the timber can be cut at a profit and at the same time the reproduction of the forest can be safely secured. A working plan usually includes a considerable number of maps, which often have to be drawn in the first place from actual surveys on the ground by the Forest Examiner. These maps contain the information secured by working-plan studies, and are of the first necessity for the wise and skilful handling of the forest. They often constitute, also, most important documents in the history of its condition and use.

On many of the National Forests the need for immediate use of the timber is so urgent and so just that there is no time to prepare elaborate working plans. Timber sales must be made, and made at once; but they must be made, nevertheless, in a way that will fully protect the future welfare of the forest. Whether working plans can be prepared or not, a most important duty of the technical Forester is to work out the conditions under which a given body of timber can be cut with safety to the forest, especially with safety to its reproduction and future growth. The principal study for a timber sale will usually include an examination of the general features and condition of the forest, and the determination of the diameter down to which it is advisable to cut the standing trees, a diameter which must be fixed at such a size as will protect the forest and make the lumbering pay. It will include also an investigation, more or less thorough and complete, as the conditions warrant, of the silvical habits of one or more of the species of trees in that forest. The areas which form natural units for the logging and transportation of the timber must be worked out and laid off, and careful estimates, or measurements, of the amount of standing timber and of its value on the stump must be made, as well as of the cost of moving it to the mill or to the railroad.

The Forest Examiner must also consider, in many cases, the building of logging roads or railroads, timber slides, etc., and must make a careful study of the material into which the trees to be cut can best be worked up, and of the value of such material in the market. Most of all, however, he must study, think over, and decide what he will recommend as to the conditions which are to govern the logging conditions by which the protection of the forest is to be insured. These conditions, fixed by his superiors upon the report of the Forest Examiner, determine whether an individual timber sale is forestry or forest destruction. This is the central question in the administration of the National Forests from the national point of view.

The principal objects of the conditions laid down for a timber sale are always the reproduction of the forest and its safety against fire. Natural reproduction from self-sown seed is almost invariably the result desired; and so the question of the seed trees to be left, and how they are to be located or spaced, is fundamental, unless there is ample young growth already on the ground. In the latter case this young growth must not be smashed or bent by throwing the older trees on top of it, or against it, and the young saplings bent down by the felled tops must be promptly released.

In order to avoid danger to the young growth already present or to be secured, as well as to protect the older trees from fires, the slash produced in lumbering, the tops lopped from the trees up to and beyond the highest point to which the lumbermen are required to take the logs, must be satisfactorily disposed of--either by scattering it thinly over the ground, by piling and burning, or often by piling alone.

These and many other conditions of sale must be studied out in a form adapted to each particular case, and must be discussed with the men who propose to buy, who often have wise and practical suggestions to make.

Similar questions on a less important scale present themselves and must be answered in the matter of small timber sales, and of timber given without charge under free-use permits to settlers and others.

When the terms of a contract of sale have been worked out and accepted and the timber has been sold, then the Forest Assistant has charge of the extremely interesting task of marking the trees that are to be cut, in accordance with these terms. Usually this is done by marking all the trees which are to be felled, but sometimes by marking only the trees which are to remain.

The marking is usually done by blazing each tree and stamping the letters "U. S." upon the blaze with a Government marking axe or hatchet. It must be done in such a way that the loggers will have no excuse either for cutting an unmarked tree or leaving a marked tree uncut, or _vice versa_, as the case may be. The marking may be carried out by the Rangers and Forest Guards under supervision of the Forest Assistant, or in difficult situations he may mark or direct the marking of each tree himself. Marking is fascinating work.

Later, while the logging is under way, the Forest Examiner will often inspect it to see that the terms of the sale are complied with, that the trees cut are thrown in places where they will not unduly damage either young growth or the larger trees which are to remain, and that the other conditions laid down for the logging in the contract of sale are observed. The scaling of the logs to determine the amount of payment to the Government will many times be under his supervision, although in the larger sales this work, as well as the routine inspection of the logging, is usually carried out by a special body of expert lumbermen, who often bring to it a much wider knowledge of the woods than the men in actual charge of the lumbering.

In nearly every National Forest there are areas upon which the trees have been destroyed by fire. Many of these are so large or so remote from seed-bearing trees that natural reproduction will not suffice to replace the forest. In such localities planting is needed, and for that purpose the Forest Examiner must establish and conduct a forest nursery. The decision on the kind of trees to plant and on the methods of raising and planting them, the collection of the seed, the care and transplanting of the young trees until they are set out on the site of the future forest, forms a task of absorbing interest. Such work often requires a high degree of technical skill. It is likely to occupy a larger and larger share of the time and attention of the trained men of the Forest Service.

The Forest Assistant's or Examiner's knowledge of surveying makes it natural for him to take an important part in the laying out of new roads and trails in the forest, or in correcting the lines of old ones, and there is little work more immediately useful. The forest can be safeguarded effectively just in proportion to the ease with which all parts of it can be reached. Forest protection may be less technically interesting than other parts of the Forester's work, but nothing that he does is more important or pays larger dividends in future results.

In addition to his studies of the habits and reproduction of the different trees for working plans or timber sales, or simply to increase his knowledge of the forest, the Forest Examiner is often called upon to lay out sample plots for ascertaining the exact relation of each species to light, heat, and moisture, or for studying its rate of growth. He may find it necessary to determine the effect of the grazing of cattle or sheep on young growth of various species and of various ages, or to ascertain their relative resistance to fire. In general, what time he can spare from more pressing duties is very fully occupied with adding to his silvical knowledge by observation, with studies of injurious insects or fungi, of the reasons for the increase or decrease of valuable or worthless species of trees in the forest, the innumerable secondary effects of forest fires, the causes of the local distribution of trees, or with some other of the thousand questions which give a never-failing interest to work in the woods.

The protection of a valuable kind of tree often depends upon the ability to find a use for, and therefore to remove, a less-valuable species which is crowding it out, for as yet the American Forester can do very little cutting or thinning that does not pay. Just so, the protection of a given tract against fire may depend upon the ability to use, and therefore to remove, a part or the whole of the dead and down timber which now makes it a fire trap. For such reasons as these, the uses of wood and the markets for its disposal form exceedingly important branches of study for the Forest Examiner, who will usually find that his duties require him to be thoroughly familiar with them.